Surrender to Chaos

Why great startups don’t fit frameworks.

Every founder asks for a PMF framework. They want the formula: TAM models, wedge strategies, velocity metrics. Anything that feels safer than chaos.

They actually don’t want frameworks. They want permission to stop being scared.

Maps only show where others have already been.

At Meter, I fired myself from product and moved to sales. Fifty cold calls taught me what no framework could: our positioning screamed “small startups”. We needed to pander to the enterprise.

Without frameworks, you’re admitting you don’t know what you’re building. Most founders can’t stomach that.

Real chaos requires believing something everyone knows is impossible. Not optimism. Not confidence. The kind of conviction that makes you look genuinely unwell to rational people.

Uber’s TAM was $15 billion, the global taxi market. VCs passed because that wasn’t big enough. The frameworks couldn’t imagine people driving their own cars for money. Airbnb’s founders actually believed strangers would sleep in each other’s beds. That doesn’t sound like vision. That feels like borderline insanity.

The best founders I meet all have this quality. They’re so deep in their reality distortion field they can’t understand why others don’t see it. They’re building for a world that doesn’t exist yet, but they already live there.

However, there is a cost. The cost is looking genuinely unwell to your team questioning your judgment, your family wondering if you’ve lost it, and even to the rational voice in your head at 3 AM.

VCs (like me) make this worse. We say we want disruption but keep funding the familiar. We celebrate rebels as long as they follow our template. I evaluate with frameworks knowing they’d have rejected every company in our portfolio.

The difference between productive chaos and random flailing is having some contact with reality. Answering support tickets at midnight. Building five versions simultaneously. Random walks revealing patterns you weren’t seeking.

Pivoting every two weeks based on TechCrunch isn’t chaos. It’s panic pretending to be progress.

Customers didn’t ask for cars. But they’ll tell you exactly why your current product fails if you listen. You have to know when to ignore them and when to surrender completely.

Most founders can’t handle ambiguity. They need confirmation their burn has purpose. That someone walked this path before.

Nobody has. That’s why it’s worth building.

Every great company looks inevitable in retrospect. We forget they were built by people stumbling through chaos, finding patterns nobody else saw because nobody else stayed uncomfortable long enough.

Your competitors are following frameworks right now, perfectly. That should scare you way more than chaos.